It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining.

I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out.

This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween.

Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.

This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests.

It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out. I’m also a fan of 404 Media, so it felt good to support one of its founders.

It’s that time of year (again) for signing the acceptable use policy for kiddo’s school, and I’m again grumpy about a lot of the details in here. Some of these details are me being a nitpicky academic, like the use of the word “technology” to refer to digital technologies alone. Others strike me as more serious, though.

Let’s take a look at this paragraph, listed under a “Roles and Responsibilities of Parents/Guardians” header:

This sucks on so many levels.

ALPRs suck.

This is why I include nonsense descriptions for all my Venmo transactions.

I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.

Oh, so the moral panic is hypocritical, too.

Flock provides the ALPRs here in Lexington, which makes this especially frustrating.

Well, this sucks. Appreciate Ron Wyden’s diligence in this area.

Gift link.

This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff.

Welp, this is scary.

Public-private surveillance is the worst of both worlds. Ring is creepy.

Facial recognition is the worst.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Well, this sucks.

I’m torn between how much I dislike the idea of a connected car and how easy it just now made it to get a question answered at the local dealer. I guess we wouldn’t agree to all this surveillance if it wasn’t actually useful sometimes.

Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick.

Ew, gross, no.

Guns in schools are bad, but adding surveillance to schools is not the solution.

Hear hear. Ring is a creepy company, and we shouldn’t support them.

This sounds worrying to me. Surveillance can and will be abused, and we should be wary about embracing it on this scale.